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After dinner Cara and the ladies of her party had withdrawn to their rooms to prepare for the gay warfare of the gardens. Benton, awaiting them in the rotunda, lounged on one of the low divans which circle the walls of the octagonal chamber, beneath carved lattices and Moorish panels; a cigarette between his fingers and a small cup of black coffee on the low tabouret at his elbow.
It was a dark night, the moon obscured as yet by a wrack of flying cloud, for a wind was abroad, a rising wind that blew in fitful gusts; a boisterous, blustering, bullying wind that met the traveller at sudden corners to choke and buffet him and so was gone, roaring away among roofs and chimneys, rattling windows and lattices, extinguishing flickering lamps, and filling the dark with stir and tumult.
In Main Street the Jews predominate, the Moors abound; and from the "Jolly Sailor," or the brave "Horse Marine," where the people of our nation are drinking British beer and gin, you hear choruses of "Garryowen" or "The Lass I left behind me;" while through the flaring lattices of the Spanish ventas come the clatter of castanets and the jingle and moan of Spanish guitars and ditties.
Thus, presently, we saw the blue smoke rising above my lodge, betokening to me that my Japanese factotum, Hiroshimi, now had my dinner under way. To me, it was my customary abode, my home these three years; but they beside me saw not the rambling expanse of my leisurely log mansion. They noted not the overhanging gables, the lattices of native wood. To them, yonder lay a castle in a foreign land.
Asad, waiting to learn who came, halted at the foot of the white glistening steps, whilst from doors and lattices of the palace flooded light to suffuse the courtyard and set the marbles shimmering. A dozen Nubian javelin-men advanced, then ranged themselves aside whilst into the light stepped the imposing, gorgeously robed figure of Asad's wazeer, Tsamanni.
The lattices were thrown back, and shewed beyond their embowered arch the moon-light landscape, shadowy and soft; its groves, and plains extending gradually and indistinctly to the eye, its distant mountains catching a stronger gleam, and the nearer river reflecting the moon, and trembling to her rays.
The dark, narrow lanes and endless zigzag alleys had an indescribable interest, with their accumulated dirt of neglect and dust of a land where rain is so seldom known. One looks up in passing at those overhanging balconies, imagining the fate of the harem-secluded women behind them, occasionally catching stolen glances from curious eyes peering between the lattices. What a life is theirs!
Evening was falling as Barnabas came to the top of the hill and, drawing rein, paused there to look down at a certain inn. It was a somewhat small and solitary inn, an ancient inn with many lattices, and with pointed gables whose plaster and cross-beams were just now mellowed by the rosy glow of sunset.
A servant girl, with a candle in her hand, opened the door, and conducted Flemming and Berkley to the chamber which had been engaged. It was a large room on the lower floor, wainscoted with pine, and unpainted. Three lofty and narrowwindows, with leaden lattices and small panes, looked southward towards the valley of Lauterbrunnen and the mountains.
As she sat by the window, her usual place for sewing and observation, she would gaze at the damp little garden, where the volubilis and the nasturtiums, stripped of their blossoms, were dropping away from the lattices with an air of exhaustion, at the long, straight line of the grassy slope of the fortifications, still fresh and green, and, a little farther on, at the corner of a street, the office of the Paris omnibuses, with all the points of their route inscribed in enticing letters on the green walls.
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